Violent treatment of migrants at Croatia’s border has decreased, but police still resort to illegal pushbacks, and this is only likely to get worse once the country joins the Schengen area next year, said an official from a leading human rights NGO.
Croatia is envisaged to join the borderless Schengen area from 1 January 2023, pending the final confirmation of EU leaders in December, making its border with Bosnia and Serbia the external Schengen border.
“What we fear the most is another escalation of pushbacks. A lot will depend on EU migration policies, which are not going in the right direction, and we see proposals to legalise internal pushbacks,” Sara Kekuš of the Centre for Peace Studies (CMS) told N1 television on Sunday.
She said the “intensity of violence at the Croatian border has decreased, but we still see illegal deportations,” adding that 2,600 cases of illegal deportation were recorded in the first eight months of 2022.
“Unfortunately, we see that the concrete practices at the border have not changed,” Kekuš said, but added that this was not “unique to Croatia.”
In separate comments, Prime Minister Andrej Plenković said in an interview for the German magazine Focus, carried on the government’s website, that there would be no violent pushbacks against migrants.
“We train our police in accordance with national and European legislation, and we have looked into all incidents that were not in line with that.”
He said Croatia has 6,000 police officials deployed along its 1,300-km border with Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro.
Western media reports published in the autumn of 2021 alleged that Croatia’s border police and men in balaclavas had subjected asylum seekers and migrants to mistreatment, including beating, detention, and confiscation of property.
The police then launched an internal investigation, and several officers faced disciplinary procedures.
(Zoran Radosavljević | EURACTIV.com)
Source: euractiv.com
